Case Study - PPFAS DevOps

PPFAS DevOps

The Client: Parag Parikh Financial Advisory Services Pvt. Ltd. (PPFAS Ltd.), a boutique investment advisory firm incorporated in 1992, has promoted PPFAS Asset Management (PPFAS AMC). PPFAS Ltd. is also amongst India’s earliest SEBI Registered Portfolio Management Service (PMS) providers. Equity mutual fund scheme of PPFAS Mutual Fund is a multicap scheme is not bound by any market-capitalisation or sectoral restrictions. It can also participate in special situations/arbitrage opportunities arising in India. It also has the freedom to invest in stocks listed overseas. PPFAS has thousands of investors and manages assets worth INR 1,050 crore.

Challenges

PPFAS portal & application have thousands of users daily, including investors and agents. As PPFAS grew in popularity and agents began using the application more and more, the company's legacy infra system could not keep up with the demand. But being a startup, and they wanted to onboard investors rapidly without investing a lot in their own hardware resources to make that happen. They did not want to spend all their time maintaining the underlying technology, whether that be device connectivity or servers.

'We often found ourselves involved in a production system upgrade that went sideways instead of staying in and writing a great new feature for our application.' Said PPFAS. PPFAS desperately needed to minimize deployment risk and cost, and speed up the deployment cycle.

'In some situations, recovering from a failed upgrade may itself fail, in which case we had a real emergency on our hands that impacts users and tarnishes the public image we're working hard to build' was a critical pain area shared by PPFA. The company also needed to find a way to easily build security into its web-based application.

Why Amazon Web Services (AWS)

AWS is a secure cloud services environment, offering compute power, database storage, content delivery and other functionality to help businesses scale and grow. Explore how millions of customers are currently leveraging AWS cloud products and solutions to build sophisticated applications with increased flexibility, scalability and reliability.

By moving to AWS, organizations are realizing benefits such as a broad IT infrastructure, support for a variety of use cases, feature sets, enhanced visibility, and the ability to deploy globally within minutes.

Solution

PPFAS began using AWS Elastic Beanstalk, a service for deploying and scaling web applications and services. Developers can upload code to Elastic Beanstalk, which then automatically handles the deployment, from capacity provisioning, load balancing, and auto-scaling to application health monitoring.

The company is using an Elastic Beanstalk worker environment to run web-based application. AWS PAAS and CI-CD solution on the AWS platform provided a safer, less stressful way to upgrade production software for PPFAS. As we bring complete CI-CD implemented, PPFAS now can validate the new application version before going live.

We have created the pipeline using AWS CodePipeline, a service that builds, tests, and deploys your code every time there is a code change. We used GitHub account, an Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) bucket repository as the source location for the application code. We used AWS Elastic Beanstalk, as the deployment target for the app.

PPFAS complete pipeline is able to detect changes made to the source repository containing the sample app and then automatically update your live Environment. Continuous deployment allows PPFAS to deploy revisions to a Dev, staging and production environment automatically making the entire software release process automated.

Tools Set

AWS CodePipeline: It is a continuous delivery service you can use to model, visualize, and automate the steps required to release your software.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk: Elastic Beanstalk employs Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancing to scale and balance workloads. It provides tools in the form of Amazon CloudWatch to monitor the health of deployed applications. It also provides capacity provisioning due to its reliance on AWS S3 and EC2.

AWS CloudWatch: It collects monitoring and operational data in the form of logs, metrics, and events, providing you with a unified view of AWS resources, applications, and services that run on AWS and on-premises servers.

AWS CodeBuild: Is a managed cloud service that enables an IT developer to automate and manage server builds for applications that reside in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) public cloud.

Business Benefits

Developers can upload code to Elastic Beanstalk, which then automatically handles the deployment, from capacity provisioning, load balancing, and auto-scaling to application health monitoring.

The organization also has better visibility into system performance. When the organization started using Amazon CloudWatch to track latencies, they have a much clearer picture of the causes, and prompt actions taken to eliminate them.

Running the tools and infrastructure in AWS has delivered a range of benefits to PPFAS. AWS infrastructure has supported the peaks without manual intervention and with no reduction in performance or availability to our customers.

The end-result which customer has that they have been able to reduce the average turnaround time required to complete scenarios by over 50 percent — improving the quality and timeliness of our service to clients.

Why i2k2

As an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner & Managed Amazon cloud services provider, i2k2 provides comprehensive folio of cloud solutions along with prompt and reliable support. Our partnership with AWS goes several years back, even before we formalized our association with the company in 2013. Key reason to choose i2k2 was 20 years of proven business. Talent is vast due to extensive IT exposure in India.

About i2k2 Networks

i2k2 Networks is the No.1 Dedicated Web Hosting company in India and a trusted name in the IT cloud hosting services industry that offers a full gamut of cutting edge enterprise solutions which drive business in today's Internet-powered world. Our folio includes Dedicated Servers, Cloud Hosting- Public, Private and Hybrid, Data Center Services, Business Email Solutions, Managed IT Services, Backup, and DR Solutions, DevOps Services, Cloud Enablement, Enterprise Hardware solutions, and various other integrated services. A team of dedicated and professionally driven IT experts conversant with diverse client requirements are available 24x7x365 to provide extended support. With superior technologies to host, design and develop high-quality websites and applications, we ensure to deliver unmatched value to our clients.